I remember someone on a forum said something in 2008… “The closest videogames have yet gotten to Literature”? It’s easy to see why - it’s a story focused a lot on the development of a place and community, deals with topics like human/capitalist exploitation of the natural world for parodically frivolous ends, the . Also it makes a lot of wild leaps (both topically and narratively/structurally) and often breaks its ankles at the landing. That said… I think by now it’s not only clearly just a face-in-the-crowd among “literary” videogames, it’s also highly debatable whether it ever really was a frontrunner even when it released - awareness of the broadness of the non-English videogame corpus, as well as greater permissiveness as to what constitutes a ‘game’ at all, has greatly increased since that time, and I can imagine a few visual novels that easily rival Mother 3 in thematic and narrative boldness.
I think its narrative connection to EarthBound is both incredibly interesting in how well it ‘works’ relative to how unimportant it is to understanding the story. All you really need to ‘get’ Porky’s character is that he’s a comically powerful capitalist oligarch with childlike desires and wants - that he was once the follower of the previous game’s alien antagonist, who himself was raised on Earth in the 1890s, is irrelevant except as a further wrinkle on Porky’s personality. Still, it doesn’t seem arbitrary or a forced attempt to wedge this story into the series - it does track that the Pig King’s tyranny would be about callously reshaping the world to resemble his childhood and its cultural values, and seeing the urbanisation, high prices and crooked cops of Onett reemerge on Tazmily - EarthBound’s light parody recast as tragedy - feels like a wry joke spread across both games.
For me… Mother 3 was kind of a watershed in my perspective on what games are, and what games needed to be to be something I could respect as an adult. I was 20 when it released, and 22 when I played it. Before that, I was firmly pessimistic that games as they structurally were could be a worthy mature artform without further evolution. I’d seen how games had leaped from the “facile” artifice of arcade games (arbitrary “lives” and “score”, constant focus on action and skill with only brief or implicit narrative content, divisions into “levels” without a real sense of place or continuity) to the richer, more expressive forms of console RPGs and action-adventures, but was convinced that a second leap was necessary and inevitable to shed those remaining artifices that only “got in the way of” the narrative - “mindless” NPCs, endless identical random encounters, hit points, save points, making the player-character run around in circles for no reason with no consequence, and so forth - in order to become a fully dignified narrative experience the whole way through. Until games reached a point where everything onscreen made sense for the narrative and characters, and could explain everything the player can do in terms of that, they would still fall short of maturity.
Well, I finally played Mother 3, videogame “literature”, and whatta you know - it’s still got goddamn random encounters and hit points and NPCs that repeat one sentence over and over and all the rest of that. What was I expecting? Anything different at all? Moreover, did I think Mother 3 was artistically worse for being an RPG with all the usual stuff?
Some time afterward, I gradually grew to accept that this second leap wasn’t going to happen and that games would be stuck in this adolescence indefinitely - but even still, games like Mother 3 were still possible in these confines. Then ten years later, millennials were all adults and tastemakers, and magically all these immature artifices like hit points and lives and random encounters and level ups and all that crap became normal and acceptable, like how Shakespeare and opera rose to high culture from base origins without actually changing in the slightest, so the entire notion of design ‘leaps’ at all was swept away from under my feet. Today, I’ve accepted that the change to the medium that can fill the needs and urges I’d felt for this second leap cannot really come from the videogame in itself, but only from the player’s own cooperation - the player simply not spinning the player character in circles maniacally, ignoring whether or not instant-heal food items “make sense” or not, and meeting the game on its own terms. 20 year ago, I’d have greatly doubted that this was reasonable to ask of adults, but now all the adults have been trained to do this from childhood, so that’s that.
One final thing I’m not surprised by, despite it being astounding at the time, is how minor this game’s overall cultural impact feels like relative to EarthBound. For what had been hailed as a work of transcendent, never-before-seen authorship at the time, it would have seemed difficult to believe that there are more “EarthBound-inspired” games today than explicitly Mother 3 inspired. But now… it’s much clearer how Mother 3’s narrative and structural problems, relics of its torturous development, hindered its impact - and sometimes what is inspiring to creators isn’t necessarily ambitious exploration of socially meaningful themes, but easier-to-grasp easier-to-imitate individual moments, like joke enemies that are too incompetent to attack you, or making the save points talk to you… both of which are in EarthBound. I guess the truth is that Mother 3 is, ultimately, an EarthBound-inspired game among the rest, and it didn’t so much start a legacy as become the first among many to populate that game’s legacy.
Then again, maybe I’m not looking hard enough for the Mother 3 successors in this world…
(Speaking of Undertale - some might claim Asriel’s story and boss fight is obviously derived from Lucas and Claus, but I think there’s a weensy bit more to it than that.)
I think it’s funny that there’s still people who are holding out for Nintendo to release an official translation, and aren’t interested in touching the fan translation at all.
Even if Nintendo did release an official translation, which I doubt will ever happen, I don’t think it would be as good as what the Mother 3 translation team put together.
Noteworthy, it’s available on the Japanese Nintendo Switch Online games if you want to play it in Japanese and you’re one of those people who would rather play something officially.
where does mother 3 take place? it’s definitely not eagleland, right?
i can’t speak to the original jp context of earthbound. but i assume that “america” in mother 2 has particular associations - like, imported pop culture as delightful or terrifying novelty, vague secondhand associations with the youthful student left or whatever as against a sour nationalism - that inevitably change when this game about the neverneverland of 20th century america actually gets played by people who live there. iirc english language reception of earthbound focused a lot more on the idea of the game as a bildungsroman, maybe centering the ways the game “made sense” (allegorical and moral reads of a coming of age narrative) over the other stuff (in addition to the themes, it’s also a very funny game by people who love to fuck with you).
i sorta feel like part of the myth of earthbound was in the idea that it was some kind of john the baptist figure, pointing the way for a specifically american wave of games to follow and build upon. like, it was something that unlocked the territory for other people to work with: that in portraying america through a lens of japanese pop culture it sort of showed how japanese pop culture could be re-folded into the portrayal of american life by people who lived there (i’m using american in a pretty broad sense here since some of the things i’m thinking of here are are actually canadian - scott pilgrim, sword & sworcery ep etc - i’ll leave it to someone else to dig into that one). the english language indie scene of the 2000s could be chauvinistic about japanese game development; i think part of that was a frustration that these guys were even still around, had not folded up to clear space for the bold new world to come. they seemingly didn’t know what they’d done. all those stories about people reverently approaching Nintendo Co, mario changed my life etc, only to be met with businesslike disdain - weren’t they secretly hoping for this kind of admission, for a handing over of the torch?
with that in mind what would mother 3 mean? “earthbound 64” could be compelling as a dream because technology is another way we imagine vgames as taking big portentous steps. mother 3 as an unlocalised handheld game that only seemed interested in tackling the fantasy america stuff in the harshest, most dismissive way - - it had other jokes, but it didn’t seem to think that one was very funny anymore. even if it was more successful as an artgame - more complex, richer, weirder, etc - i think it was always gonna be be an odd fit within the “canon” of carefully selected, legitimating ancestors. maybe the biggest legacy it’ll have is in the ways it sidestepped the usual awful ways that an artistic work becomes a legacy.
anyway idk i’ve never completed it bc the emulation issues with the rhythm system when battling - it’s funny that this is now another cliche of the earthboundlike, even if it derives more in practice from stuff like paper mario. i liked the frogs. in addition to all of the still-surprising stuff it does i feel like part of the value it has is that it kind of punctures some of the more hagiographic stuff around the mother series, makes it easier to see them as distinct works by people with identifiable sensibilities, rather than precursors and omens of a world that never was to come.
Really really interesting. Talk to me more about artifice and how we’ve gotten used to it. I remember when I was younger I was actively turned off by RPGs because abstractions like health-as-numbers and combat taking turns seemed too disjointed and unsuspended my disbelief.
Then I stopped playing games for several years. When I came back, I tried RPGs again (starting with EarthBound, funnily), and I now have infinitely more patience for them now than anything that demands real-time reactions. They’re probably my favourite genre now. I’ve come to love the abstractions because they encourage me to read more into what’s being given while hopefully still stopping myself short of seeing things that just aren’t there.
Mother 3 (which I only played two years ago) is very linear, to the point that unlike the first two I do wonder if the story would have suited a manga or visual novel or something. The beautiful art, music and sentiments go a long way to mitigating the sense that unlike EB, this world is a fixed selection of setpieces, and not a unified world. The final boss got a few tears out of me, for what that’s worth.
Also, out of curiosity, which VNs of (or likely long before) the time would give Mother 3 a run for its money? I can also think of a few, but it feels like they’re often going for more extreme feelings, whereas Mother games never lose sight of a certain idiosyncratic ‘weird’ sincerity. It’s hard to explain. I buy Itoi’s journals every year and the quotes on each page feel like physical Mother NPC textboxes. Nothing quite like them
This question (what Mother 3’s setting even is) is actually an important part of the unfolding story. Suffice to say, it’s obvious from the outset that it’s not just a place comparable to a real world nation.
I think this is unnecessary caution because, as it turns out, the majority of the strongest damage-per-second moves in the game end up being either PSI, which doesn’t use rhythm presses anyway, and most of the utility moves are strong enough to see frequent use over just attacking with those characters anyway.
I like how long the game takes to ‘start’ like you’re in chapter 3 and still a monkey who can’t hit hard. I love chapter 3,its completely HEARTRENDING. it’s where most of my friends who I convinced to play the game quit
the animation in the beginning where flint is upset and swinging the stick at people is some of my favorite sprite work in a game ever. the way he gets tired and hunches over! there’s so much fucking emotion in those tiny little sprites
the grow up and move on message was good but should have been even harsher
are the emulation issues with rhythm fixed now? I thought they were. I didn’t have to use toups ye olde frame adjustment trick to hit dudes on time last I played
I played both Earthbound and Mother 3 as an adult, with a 5 year gap in between. the former is probably my favorite game, the latter is something I sort of like. I think the sequel loses the ineffable meandering spirit of the original in favor of specificity, which is something I’m less and less interested in art as I get older
your write-up made me realize that Mother 3 takes the rejection of nostalgia in Earthbound’s climax and applies it to capitalism at large via Porky’s childish authoritarianism. I like that
i first played this game in JP with a translation FAQ open in a separate window. i’ll always cherish that memory
it’s fittingly been a decade since i last revisited it, so i’m due. maybe this can be a once a decade thing in the same way EB is a once every 2 years or so thing
i used to really hail M3 but i admit i kinda cringe thinking about swathes of it, and that’s what’s held off another replay for so long. like i remember them being charming in practice, but hooo weeee do i hate everything about the Ma***sies conceptually right down to their damn name. aged like milk that was already going a little sour
(btw speaking of does anyone remember how you could leave fresh milk in your inventory, and eventually it would go sour, but then if you left it longer it would turn into yogurt which was a stronger healing item than fresh milk. i liked that. the Ma[slurtrannies] did not become yogurt, to me)
iirc the fresh eggs→chicks →chickens are present in M3 as well, though i don’t remember if you can still turn an early-game profit by raising your own chicken farm in your pocket like you can in EB. (there’s no For Sale sign (boo!) so it’s def not as easy to exploit (chickens))
I don’t have any fancy words to say about it really, but Mother 3 is and has been my all time favorite game for an incredibly long time. It just really clicks with me in a particular way I haven’t gotten from anything else. I think I just really like games with a lot of “novelty” to them cause that’s a good way to describe a lot of the highlight moments I think about a lot. In particular a lot of that “novelty” isn’t just little events that happen, but they’re actual gameplay mechanics that you engage with directly instead of just watching. The narrative also really tugs at me and inconsistently get emotional at a few choice points.
